Event description
This event has passed.
While enormous strides have been made in shifting public narratives around fair taxation and in establishing key policy measures on the global agenda, the international framework for tax remains fundamentally flawed. The sustained influence of elites and their professional enablers has left national governments unable to deliver progressive taxation to support broad-based human well-being, and to underpin the social contract. Countries are on course to lose US$4.7 trillion in tax to tax havens over the next 10 years, starving countries of the resources to respond to crises of climate, inequality, inflation, conflict and more.
The escalation of the dual crisis of inequality and climate breakdown in particular demands a radical rethinking of what constitutes fair, transformative and effective eco-social policies. Two movements are increasingly realizing just how much they are aligned in pursuing these goals. Both the climate justice and the tax justice movements are progressive actors trying to redress deeply discriminatory practices and legacies that are being upheld by a minority at the expense of everyone else. There is no climate justice without economic justice.
We are now at a critical juncture for understanding and mobilizing the role of taxation for climate justice. And while the Paris agreement set emission targets without mentioning the role of fiscal policies, there is now increasing consensus that part of the missing climate finance gap should be sourced through targeted tax measures. The role of tax to fill some of the climate finance gap is finally being recognized.
Beyond those targeted taxes that can raise revenue, tax justice offers a holistic, systemic vision for how to reorganize parts of the global financial system that will yield critical climate justice outcomes. For example, ending financial secrecy and creating an enabling, not constraining, regulatory environment will allow winning positive climate outcomes. If we can’t tax the largest economic actors because we don’t know where their activity is, we cannot address negative externalities of their activities effectively. Systematically implementing Country by Country Reporting for multinationals would help realise undertaxed global multinational profits to become a sustainable revenue source.
At this event, we will discuss the power of fiscal policies for climate justice from different influencing vantage points. It will bring together experts and activists in the fields of inequality, climate and human rights to share their expertise and insights on why a progressive tax system is a necessary building block for a fair transition, and how to reduce inequality and protect vulnerable communities in the process.
Speakers
Emilia Reyes
Programme director of policies and budgets for equality and sustainable development, at Equidad
@Emilia_EquidadEmilia Reyes is Programme Director of Policies and Budgets for Equality and Sustainable Development, at Equidad de Género: Ciudadanía, Trabajo y Familia (Gender Equity: Citizenship, Work and Family). She is Co-Convenor of the Women’s Working Group on Financing for Development, as well as a co-lead of the Economic Justice and Rights Action Coalition in the UN Women’s Beijing+25 process. She’s a Contributing Author in the segment “Gender, Climate Justice and Transformative Pathways” of the IPCC report: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. For five years she was an Organizing Partner of the Women’s Major Group for the 2030 Agenda; for two years she was Co-chair of the High Level Political Forum’s Major Groups and Stakeholders Coordination Mechanism.
Franziska Mager
Senior Researcher-Advocate (Climate & Inequalities), Tax Justice Network
@franziskamagerFranziska is Senior Researcher and Advocacy Lead (Climate & Inequalities) at the Tax Justice Network. She leads the Tax Justice Network’s work on integrating tax and climate justice approaches in service of reducing inequalities. Prior to joining the Tax Justice Network, Franziska led complex applied and policy research for a number of years, including for Oxfam’s flagship inequality campaign as well as at the sustainability think tank Hot or Cool. She holds degrees from the Free University of Berlin and University of Oxford.
Julia Davies
Patriotic Millionaires
Julia Davies is a true impact investor, lawyer, philanthropist, environmental campaigner and founding member of Patriotic Millionaires UK dedicated to catalysing action to tackle the climate and environmental crises and inter-connected social issues under the banner We Have The POWER, with POWER standing for Protect Our World – Educate Restore.
Olivier de Schutter
United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights
@DeSchutterOOlivier De Schutter was appointed the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights by the Human Rights Council at its 43rd session in March 2020.
A Professor of Law at UCLouvain and SciencesPo (Paris), Mr De Schutter was the Special Rapporteur on the right to food from 2008 to 2014, and a member of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights between 2015 and 2020. Prior to those appointments, he was Secretary-General of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).
He holds a LLM from Harvard University, a diploma cum laude from the International Institute of Human Rights (Strasbourg) and a PhD in Law from UCLouvain.